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On Halloween night of 1963, 6-year old Michael Myers stabbed his sister to death. After sitting in a mental hospital for 15 years, Myers escapes and returns to Haddonfield to kill. Full summary » | Full synopsis »

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According to Don Post Jr., President of Don Post Studios, the famous California mask making company, the filmmakers originally approached his firm about custom making an original mask for use in the film. The filmmakers explained that they could not afford the numerous costs involved in creating a mask from scratch, but would offer Post points in the movie as payment for his services. Post declined their offer, as he received many such proposals from numerous unknown filmmakers all the time.See more »

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Crew or equipment visible: In a close up on the phone before Lindsay answers it, someone's shadow moves into the light.See more »

I have just recently been through a stage where I wanted to see why it
is that horror films of the 90's can't hold a candle to 70's and 80's
horror films. I have been very public in this forum about the vileness
of films like The Haunting and Urban Legend and such. I feel that they
(and others like them) don't know what true horror is. And it bothered
me to the point where it made me go to my local video store and rent
some of the classic horror films. I already own all the Friday's so I
rented The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Nightmare On Elm
Street, Jaws, The Exorcist, Angel Heart, The Exorcist and Halloween.
Now the other films are classics in their own right but it is here that
I want to tell you about Halloween. Because what Halloween does is
perhaps something no other film in the history of horror film can do,
and that is it uses subtle techniques, techniques that don't rely on
blood and gore, and it uses these to scare the living daylights out of
you. I was in a room by myself with the lights off and as silly as I
knew it was, I wanted to look behind me to see if Michael Myers was
there. No movie that I have seen in the last ten years has done that to
me. No movie.

John Carpenter took a low budget film and he scared a generation of
movie goers. He showed that you don't need budgets in the 8 or 9
figures to evoke fear on an audience. Because sometimes the best
element of fear is not what actually happens, but what is about to
happen. What was that shadow? What was that noise upstairs? He knows
that these are the ways to scare someone and he uses every element of
textbook horror that I think you can use. I even think he made up some
of his own ideas and these should be ideas that people use today. But
they don't. No one uses lighting and detail to provoke scares, they use
special effects and rivers of blood. And it is just not the same. You
can't be scared by a giant special effect that makes loud noises and
jumps out of a wall. It's the moments when the killer is lurking,
somewhere, you just don't know where, that scare you. And Halloween
succeeds like no other film in this endeavor.

In 1963 a young Micael Myers kills his sister with a large butcher
knife and then spends the next 15 years of his life, silently locked up
in an institute. As Loomis ( his doctor) says to Sheriff Brackett, " I
spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven making
sure that he never gets out, because what I saw behind those eyes was
pure e-vil. " That sets up the manic and relentless idea of a killer
that will stop at nothing to get what he wants. And all he wants here
is to kill Laurie. No one know why he wants to kill her, but he does.(
Halloween II continues the story quite well )

What Carpenter has done here is taken a haunting score, mendacious
lighting techniques and wrote and directed a tightly paced masterpiece
of horror. There is one scene that has to be described. And that is the
scene where Annie is on her way to pick up Paul. She goes to the car
and tries to open it. Only then does she realize that she has left her
keys in the house. She gets them, comes back out and inadvertently
opens the car door without using the keys. The audience picks up on
this but she doesn't. She is too busy thinking about Paul. When she
sits down, she notices that the windows are fogged up. She is puzzled
and starts to wipe away the mist, and then Myers strikes, from the back
seat. This is such a great scene because it pays attention to detail.
We know what is happening and Annie doesn't. But it's astute
observations that Carpenter made that scared the hell out of movie
goers in 1978 and beyond.

Halloween uses blurry images of a killer standing in the background, it
has shadows ominously gliding across a wall, dark rooms, creepy and
haunting music, a sinister story told hauntingly by Donald Pleasance
and a menacing, relentless killer. My advice to film makers in our day
and age is to study Halloween. It should be the blue print for what
scary movies are all about. After all, Carpenter followed in
Hitchcock's steps, maybe director's should follow in his.

Halloween personifies everything that scares us. If you are tired of
all the mindless horror films that don't know the difference between
evil and cuteness, then Halloween is a film that should be seen. It
won't let you down. I enjoy being scared, I don't know why, but I do.
But nothing has scared me in the 90's, except maybe one film ( Wes
Craven's final Nightmare ). If you enjoy beings scared, then Halloween
is one that you should see. And if you have already seen it a hundred
times, go and watch it again, back to back with a film like Urban
Legend. Urban Legend will have you enticed at all the pretty faces in
the movie. Halloween will have you frozen with fear, stuck in your
seat, not wanting to move. Now tell me, what horror film would you
rather watch?

And just to follow up after seeing Zombie's version, it makes you
appreciate this that much more. This is a classic by definition. Zombie
bastardized his version, but it doesn't take away from the brilliance
of this one.

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